Before I took this class, I considered myself a fairly high-brow moviegoer. In Lincoln, Nebraska, that’s not a hard designation to give yourself. I ran with the intellectually snotty crowd, the speech and debate team/math nerds/artisans, and even for them, Donnie Darko was considered artsy – being a connoisseur of foreign films meant seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I considered my politically active “thinking blockbusters” a sure mark of my intellectual superiority. Before I went to college, I think the least mainstream film I ever saw was Juliet of the Spirits, my mother’s favorite film when she was in college. I did not “get” it, to say the least.
I haven’t “gotten” most of the movies we’ve seen in World Screen: Aesthetics and Politics. I surely don’t feel like an intellectual cinephile anymore, but I’ve also come to realize that it’s all right not to “get” movies – that’s not really the point of cinema. I think it was 4 that broke down this mental obstacle, and I’m glad I met it. I do know new ways to think about how I’m thinking about – receiving, interacting with, forming memories of even while I watch – films, new things to consider.
Since aesthetics is the theme of the class, though, I am trying to figure out what my aesthetic is. I changed my top ten list during the last week, from where it sat unchanged since the beginning of the semester, and I think the new list reflects what I feel my aesthetic is. I write fiction too, so aesthetics are doubly important – it translates to “voice” in writing, and voice is something I have always struggled with. I always considered myself “versatile”, both in taste and style, but I think what I really meant was that I did not know what to call my own, what resonated in the soul. But I read an essay this semester while researching Japanese domestic politics that did resonate in the soul: “Revenge and Recapitation”, by Marilyn Ivy, in the anthology of essays, Japan After Japan (highly recommended, by the way). I didn’t even end up using the essay. It was far too psychocultural for a politics class obsessed with realism and strategy. But it said, in brief: “Embodying a consumerist and self-absorbed subjectivity (if one can still call it that), the young no longer have the capacity to die for anything; even their suicides are completely self-referential. If they could only be rearticulated as subjects of an intact nation-state in which war atrocities no longer figured as such, then the banality of everyday peace could be refigured. But to do so, they must be willing to die – sacrifice has to be made real – and to kill.”
Around this same time that I was researching Japan, my mother said to me that I really liked the theme of extinction, didn’t I. She’s right. Extinction is my aesthetic. The deterioration of civilization. And that’s the reason that my first favorite, soul-shaking film – the first movie that I did not love because I loved my father, now dead, or because I was proudly aware of political complexity, and I was a political science major, no, the first film I loved for no reason I could then discern – was Akira. I saw it the summer after my freshman year at college. It remains my second-favorite today, a close second to Apocalypse Now. To quote my blog, where I originally wrote the following paragraph,
Because it really shows Japan as a model – and possibly the only model, because it was the only country to receive an atomic bomb, let alone two – of what a post-apocalyptic society on Earth might look like. We destroyed Japan in World War II. With pardon to Holocaust victims, Japan experienced “destruction of the world in miniature form”. I don’t think anybody would argue that Akira is a response to that. In Akira, the atomic bombs are replaced with this boy-wonder, Akira, whose mental and psychic powers spiralled out of the control of his military programmers and resulted in a blast that wiped out Tokyo – thus the movie takes place in Neo-Tokyo. So, too, Japan survived, almost inexplicably. But it can’t return to the status quo, never. If you have fears, like I do, that the world is moving toward some kind of self-decimation, Japan is the forecast for the future, at least in terms of its people. I can see aspects of it emerging already, even outside Japan:
Thus Japanese youths are still being force-fed the anachronistic ideologies of modernization – taught to compete for the monolithic postwar Japanese middle-class goals of good diploma, good job at a big company, and good marriages (for girls) – centered on institutions such as homes, schools, and corporations that used to socialize individuals into national subjects. Yet the validity of this message is constantly undermined by images in the media and everyday experiences surrounding the youths. They cannot help but notice the deterioration of these once-unquestioned institutions and their creeds, and they see the unhappiness and self-destructive conducts of adults still tethered to them. The violence and moral paralysis of youths today, according to Murakami, is symptomatic of the profound and widespread confusion they suffer as the result of this contradiction. The adult Japanese, on the other hand, are wallowing in an acute sense of desolation; middle-aged Japanese men, for example, continue to cling to the corporate collective even though it no longer offers them a sense of larger purpose and meaning, as it did during the era of national modernization. (Japan After Japan, p. 39)
This is a best of a tangent, I know, but it explains my love for 4, especially of the parts no one else loves – the scenes of post-industrial Russia, with its fields of decay and its hostile dogs. They are, I think, open images, although the discourse they force is strictly between you and the panorama, between you and the civilization you belong to. It’s uncomfortable but it’s necessary, it’s profound.
It even explains why I said a couple years ago that my first favorite movie ever was Jurassic Park: life finds a way. I firmly believe that we are a phase on the planet, that biology is stronger than any one species – that’s my religion.
I’m not sure why this is my aesthetic, however. That would require some therapy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s partly caused by general upheaval in the world – the massive changes that Felicity and others say are in the process of sweeping the globe, tsunami-like – and the general upheaval of my life. To call it the doomsday aesthetic would be wrong, however, because mine is quieter than that. It’s On The Beach, not The Day After Tomorrow. I guess this is the way I react to change. I’m a pessimist, but at the same time I’m naturally curious. All this probably makes you (as it makes me) wonder why I want to be a political analyst and make policy recommendations. I do have ethics, and I do not want the world to speed toward oblivion, but if it is, we have to find a way to live through it. I’m an INTJ, according to Myers-Briggs – I want to make the system work. 4 laughs at me for this, I know.
I also used to live in a decaying city, Jakarta. The more I find myself writing about Jakarta, the more I realize how much my ten years there affected me, even as a child. I keep thinking back to The Year of Living Dangerously, which I saw before I realized any of this. I think it’s the only Western movie that pretends to be set in Jakarta, or maybe all of Indonesia. It’s fascinating how the U.S. insists on ignoring Southeast Asia, no matter what, except when it’s impossible to avoid – the endless Vietnam War movies attest to this. Besides that, there’s Bangkok Hilton, The Beach, Brokedown Palace – all tales of tourists in Thailand who meet terrible drug-induced ends. I think Southeast Asia makes the United States terrifically uncomfortable, in a way that Africa, say, doesn’t. And I know why too: Africa is Europe’s problem, Europe’s slave-child. Southeast Asia was, in many ways, America’s unresolved elephant in the room that nobody talks about. Vietnam’s the center of America’s neurosis, and you can tell that by all the movies we’ve made about it. But consider that I can’t name an American movie set in Singapore or Malaysia or Laos. For that reason I’m thankful for The Year of Living Dangerously. As much as I criticize it for its Hollywood derivatives, there was a certain feel of Jakarta that it got right – the shadows in the alleys, the foreboding doom, the incredible alienation despite being surrounded by thousands of people. I was there, as a Chinese couple once told me, in the “good years”, the years before the Financial Crisis of 1997-98. But they weren’t really “good years”. That’s part of extinction’s illusion. That’s what we were told, yes – the economy is booming, everyone is happy. No need to be afraid. It didn’t explain the figurative hole-in-the-soul, though. And when the Crisis hit, the elaborately constructed illusion collapsed on itself, like the Wizard’s screen falling in The Wizard of Oz. Like the power outage in Jurassic Park, and Hammond’s false flea circus that all the little children did so believe was real – trapeze fleas, fleas on parade. Real flea circuses sometimes took to propping up dead fleas on pins to heighten the illusion of a working flea society. (Laura Dern in that movie: “You never had control. That’s the illusion.”) And that’s extinction. The collapse of systems.
Like the Radiohead song, “Fitter Happier” goes: “sleeping well, no bad dreams, no paranoia… more and more calculated, no chance of escape, not self-employed, concerned but powerless, an empowered and informed member of society, pragmatism, not idealism… the ability to laugh at weakness, calm, fitter, healthier, a pig in a cage on antibiotics”.
Speaking of songs, I actually have an “extinction” playlist. It’s called If Only Tonight We Could Sleep (named after a song by Explosions in the Sky), and it goes like this:
- Felbomlasztott Mentökocsi – Venetian Snares (instrumental)
- Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box – Radiohead (“I’m a reasonable man, get off my case/ after years of waiting, nothing came”)
- Mt. Eeire – the Microphones (“do you see what happens?/ when big black death breathes on you with his breath?/ I’m wild and woolly, a bloated bully, I’ll strike you down and then/ I’ll strike you down again”)
- Mezzanine – Massive Attack (“I’m a little curious of you in crowded scenes/ and how serene your friends and fiends/ you’d agree it’s a typical high, you fly as you watch your name go by, and once the name goes by/ not thicker than water, not thicker than mud/ and the AK thuds, it does”)
- Backdrifts – Radiohead (“we’re rotting fruit, we’re damaged goods, what the hell, we’ve got nothing more to lose/ one gust and we will probably crumble, we’re backdrifting/ this far – but no further – I’m hanging off a branch, I’m teetering on the brink of honey sweet, so full of sleep, I’m backsliding/ you fell into our arms, we tried but there was nothing we could do”)
When all is said and done, I’ve learned an awful lot about myself this semester. I’m not sure if what I’ve learned is pejoratively good or bad, but I think I’ve decided that that is in the eye of the beholder, as it were.
